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My guest today is CUNY student, Matthew Terenzio. Welcome to OpEdNews, Matt. You've been in the news of late because of a great program you started. Can you tell our readers about it?
Okay. Well, actually I took CUNY's Entrepreneurial Journalism course last semester and the point of the course is to create a sustainable journalism business. My project was called MediaLobby, a demand-driven journalism platform. One of the features was an anonymous tip box. It wasn't even a large part of the project but since there was so much buzz around Wikileaks in December when I started building it, I decided to hammer out that feature first and release it as Localeaks. The idea is simple. Users can use the service to submit anonymous news tips to nearly 1500 local and state news organizations across the U.S. It's proven to be a pretty popular idea with the news organizations and I'm trying to keep up with all the requests from organizations to be added to the service.
So, this was a class assignment, Matt? Take a moment and please explain to our readers what Entrepreneurial Journalism is. That will give better context for what you created.
It was just one feature of a semester long class project, but right now, it's become a lot bigger than the project as a whole. Entrepreneurial Journalism is an idea that is gaining popularity in journalism schools to address the need for creating new business models that support producing quality journalism. As you may know, the old business models for journalism are struggling with the changing economic and digital landscapes. CUNY is a leader in this field and has launched the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism.
That's good to know. It sounds great and very necessary. Yes, traditional jobs for journalism have certainly dried up and disappeared. So, for those of us not familiar with this new entrepreneurial journalism, please explain more about your project and what a demand-driven journalism platform is.
The web is great at disrupting entrenched economic systems. Most businesses have traditionally started the product or supply side and then tried to grow a customer base. Now we have the ability to form groups and drive the production of products to feed our demands. So it will not only affect journalism and news. Kickstarter is a great example of this kind of thing. So if you know that 5,000 people have asked you to cover a given topic, you can get a pretty good estimate on what that audience will be worth and budget your coverage accordingly. It doesn't solve all news and information scenarios, but it's definitely going to be a big part of the way news providers operate in the future. the MediaLobby project is creating software to automate this demand driven system for journalism.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Localeaks-for-Anonymous-Ne-by-Joan-Brunwasser-110203-912.html |
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